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Dream job 1: Documentary producer

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Alex Tate

Windfall Films produces a wide range of programmes, from the Christmas Lectures to the first ever live surgery on TV. Which have you been involved with?

Most recently I was working on a series called Inside Nature’s Giants (ING) where we filmed the dissection of an elephant, a giraffe, a whale and a crocodile. The idea was to show people how some of the world’s largest animals evolved by exploring their anatomy. I’ve also worked on Big, Bigger, Biggest (BBB), which is about the development of structures like aircraft carriers, oil rigs, ferris wheels and skyscrapers.

A documentary producer is one of those jobs that lots of people dream about. Did that make it difficult to get into?

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There are certainly a lot of people competing for the same jobs, and typically you’ll only get employed for the duration of a programme, so you might be in a company for only a few weeks before you need to look elsewhere. Fortunately I somehow managed to land on my feet and I’ve been working at Windfall for about two-and-a-half years now, so I’ve avoided the struggle to constantly find new work. I guess I was good in my interview!

What’s an average day like?

There isn’t one really – it depends where you are in the production schedule. First there is pre-production, which is where you call the scientists, research the material, and scout for filming locations. On BBB it was about gaining access to aircraft carriers and bridges, and for ING I was calling up zoos and trying to convince them to donate their dead animals.

Then comes filming and you might be away on location for a few weeks. Finally, you spend up to eight weeks editing the material you’ve collected, condensing it down into a 45-minute programme.

Do you write a script beforehand or make it up as you go along?

It totally depends. For most animals on ING we knew in advance the pieces of anatomy we wanted to show the viewer and the order in which we wanted to reveal them, but when we filmed the whale dissection it all happened in the space of 24 hours. We heard about a whale stranded in southern Ireland at 10 am and set off a few hours later. I was sitting on the plane trying to regurgitate my zoology degree. It was like, “oh yeah, don’t they have hind legs hidden inside their body? That’s cool, let’s look at that. What about the blubber? OK, lets do something on body insulation.” We constructed the story in a matter of hours, whereas normally you have weeks.

So come on, what’s your secret to success? I don’t believe it was just your interview technique that swung the job for you…

I have a degree in zoology from the University of Nottingham, where I also studied photography, as well as a Science Media Production masters degree from Imperial College London. Work experience was invaluable, though, and it can turn out to be a job interview in itself. In between my degrees I took two years out and did some work experience at the BBC’s natural history unit on their Planet Earth series. I also worked at the Natural History Museum in London as a science communicator, and set up a small business making videos for internet sites.

What’s the best thing about your job?

Definitely the situations you find yourself in while filming. One of the most bizarre moments was listening to a choir sing a cheesy song I had co-written in the back of a Land Rover as they walked in front of a 100-foot-high church that was being moved 10 kilometres down the road. We were making a programme called Monster Moves, which followed the church’s move to a town in Iowa where there was a larger congregation.

Plus, there’s no denying that going to Japan or South Africa on location is one of the perks, and dissecting a stranded whale on the beach is an unrivalled pub story.

So is it all fun and games? There must be some downsides, surely

The preliminary phone calls can be tough. When we were doing BBB it was my job to get us access to the world’s biggest aircraft carrier. I was on the phone to the US navy press office for months. In the end I had to go to Los Angeles for a half-hour meeting to convince them to let us use it. Persuading zoos to give us their dead animals was also tricky, as was ringing freezer companies and asking them if they had a freezer big enough for a giraffe – you have to prepare a really good opening sentence!